Reframing ourselves around change-harvesting involves several important concepts or concept-clusters. Maybe the most basic of these is the idea of a “dynamic unity”. Let’s go there. We call a thing a "unity" because we experience it as a whole thing. It has an inside and an outside and a border. It might be made up […]
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RAMPS — Affecting Safety Affecting safety, the sense of belonging — being valued & accepted — is about creating a stabilizing center-of-mass built around health. A note: none of what I have to say here is relevant if your organization ignores violence, or hasn’t already taken the steps necessary to end overt racism, sexism, age-ism,
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Announcement: The Change-Harvesting Camerata is officially launched today! There’s a special launch offer. Read on, to get more info about the camerata itself, and find out the launch deal. A camerata — h/t Jess Kerr for that term — is a group of people working on a common problem, both together and separately. Part salon,
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Safety — the sense of being valued and accepted, of belonging — is a powerful motivator for many individuals. A lack of safety often seems like a simple switch, instantly shutting down talented and capable people. (This topic of safety is a minefield right now. The absence of a safe place to stand today seems,
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A respondent asks, "Are you always able to practice what you preach? I don’t mean intentionally dropping but unintentionally as your mind is sloppy. I have great difficulties in applying 100% of my "knowledge" 100% of the time." Sometimes questions open up huge areas with lots of issues and subtexts and angles, and this is
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RAMPS: Affecting Purpose Raising a sense of purpose — service to a "greater" — in someone who’s sensitive to it, involves offering purposes and then connecting to them. I try not to frame these muses as mere critique. This one’s hard for me to pull off. Clumsy ham-handed misleading efforts at motivating people via purpose
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RAMPS: P is for Purpose, the sense one is serving a valued "greater". Those who rate this band of the motivational spectrum highly can be go-to workhorses, but only if we keep them connected to their valued greater. If rhythm is largely focused on the distribution of "feels good" through one’s working life, purpose works
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RAMPS: Affecting mastery, the sense an individual has that she is growing in a way she values, means first jiggling our ideas about efficiency & relevance in work, then jumping in to the opportunities that jiggling will reveal. We talked about the widespread pernicious conceptual cluster we call "finish-line efficiency": the idea that software development
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RAMPS: M is for Mastery, the sense that my work is actively helping me grow, along some dimension I value. When my motivational spectrum calls for a high degree of mastery, I do my best work when it is just a little over my head. People sometimes confuse the drive for mastery with a drive
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Autonomy is the sense of free motion in a team. I adjust the levels of this by expressing important needs as problems, letting go of unimportant needs, and managing risk by a combination of acceptance, next-stepping, and iteration. The more we need creative technical work, the more we have to concern ourselves with providing the
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